MOSCOW, June 26. /TASS/. Russian politician and statesman Yevgeny Primakov, who died on Friday at the age of 85, will be buried on Monday, June 29, at the famous Novodevichy memorial cemetery in Moscow, which is the burial site for outstanding politicians, statesmen, scientists, arts professionals, and national heroes.
The funeral will take place at 2 p.m. local time, the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a press release. Prior to it, the public will have an opportunity to bid final farewell to Primakov at the Hall of Columns in downtown Moscow from 08 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Yevgeny Primakov was a landmark Soviet/Russian statesman, public personality, scholar, and diplomat. Born to a mixed Russian-Jewish family in Kiev on October 19, 1929, he grew up in Tbilisi and graduated from Moscow State University’s Institute of the Orient in 1953.
His extensive career spans years of journalistic activity for Arabic Service of Radio Moscow and for the Communist Party’s main daily Pravda, research and administrative positions at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations reporting to the national Academy of Sciences, and directorship at the Academy’s Institute of Oriental Studies.
In addition to this, he was a member of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Presidential Council and a deputy chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee. In 1991, he took charge of the Soviet (and then Russian) Foreign Intelligence Service.
His next crucial position was that of the Russian Foreign Minister. In August 1998, President Boris Yeltsin appointed him Russia’s Prime Minister — a job that he took up at a critical moment when the Russian government had just defaulted on its short-term sovereign liabilities and the nation had plunged into an economic crisis, the possible aftermaths of which were barely predictable at the time.
Primakov spent the last ten years of his active-duty political and state service as President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industries.